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With the 15th International AIDS Conference underway in Bangkok, American policy watchdogs charged today that the Bush administration is implicated in a conflict of interest with the drug industry. The following analysts are available for interviews from Thailand and from the United States.

ASIA RUSSELL
SHARONANN LYNCH
Both Russell and Lynch are with the group Health GAP, and they are both currently in Bangkok attending the International AIDS Conference. Russell said today: “Abner Mason is a member of the Bush administration’s Presidential Advisory Council on HIV/AIDS and chair of its International Subcommittee, as well as the president of a drug industry-funded front group named the ‘AIDS Responsibility Project.’ The main function of that organization, of which he is apparently the sole employee, has been lobbying against the use of cheap generic drugs. In Monday’s Bangkok Post, Mason’s group took out a full-page ad attacking generic drugs. It is hard to gauge whether the global AIDS treatment community is more shocked to learn that a drug industry stooge is at the highest advisory level of AIDS policy in the United States or to learn the lengths to which he and his paymasters would go to falsely undermine confidence in proven and effective treatment options.”

Lynch said today: “Delegates sent by the Bush administration have been spending a lot of time trying to undermine scientifically proven HIV treatments and prevention interventions such as condom outreach, comprehensive and age-appropriate sex-education and treatment with generic medicines prequalified by the World Health Organization. Here we have heard even more scientific evidence coming out of clinical studies and field reports supporting such approaches while U.S. Global AIDS Coordinator Randall Tobias and his entourage continue to behave as if they have blinders on. Worse yet, the United States is using its economic muscle to help big pharmaceutical companies against generic competitors whenever it negotiates bilateral trade agreements, such as with Thailand, in spite of the fact these countries facing a health crisis are allowed the right to produce or import generic drugs under World Trade Organization rules. As a new Government Accountability Office report [details below] finds, the U.S. unilateral effort is reaching too few people as it is rife with administrative chaos and riddled with restrictions that have crippled service delivery. The U.S. needs to join the global community efforts that prioritize effective, well-coordinated treatment and relief rather than drug company profits.”

JULIE DAVIDS
Julie Davids is with the Community HIV/AIDS Mobilization Project. She said today: “The Bush administration blocked key scientists from attending the Bangkok conference. This means that many U.S. scientists were shielded from learning in very concrete terms how underfunding of the Global Fund and the strings-attached nature of the funds from the bilateral U.S. initiative are harmful to global efforts to fight HIV/AIDS. These scientists were effectively segregated from their peers around the world, prevented from sharing findings and latest research…. Members of ACT UP Philadelphia, among others, are rallying Thursday, July 15, at the annual conference of the NAACP, claiming that President Bush is AWOL on AIDS and demanding that Senator Kerry take a firm and public stand on his AIDS policies.”
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Meanwhile, the U.S. Government Accountability Office [GAO] released a report this week assessing the performance of the President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief, which was announced in January 2003 as a bilateral initiative separate from the United Nations Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Malaria and Tuberculosis. The Government Accountability Office interviewed 28 staff members from two agencies responsible for carrying out the on-the-ground work, USAID and Department of Health and Human Services.

Some key findings:

* As of February 2004, a total of 78,921 people, or about 4 percent of the announced goal of 2 million by 2008, were receiving anti-retroviral treatment in these countries. [GAO Report, page 7]

* The report notes that since 2000, prices of necessary drugs have fallen considerably “owing in part to the increased availability of generic anti-retroviral drugs and public pressure.” The report explains that “some generic manufacturers have combined three drugs in one pill — known as fixed-dose combinations, or FDCs — thereby reducing the number of pills that patients must take at one time.” However, the report continues, “while major multilateral and other donors allow recipients of their funding to purchase these FDCs, the Office of the U.S. Global AIDS Coordinator currently funds only the purchase of drugs that have been approved by a ‘stringent regulatory authority.'” [GAO Report, page 6]

* When asked to identify challenges, 25 out of 28 respondents cited U.S. policy constraints — “in particular unclear guidance on whether U.S. agencies can purchase generic anti-retroviral drugs, including Fixed Dose Combination pills.” The report notes that one USAID official in Africa stated that “adhering to the agency’s current standards, which generally require that USAID-financed pharmaceuticals be produced in and shipped from the United States, will present a challenge as more governments purchase generic FDCs…” [GAO Report, page 19]

* The report explained that “staff frequently cited the need for the United States to work with the WHO … to minimize overlapping efforts, confusion over standards, and the administrative burden on host governments and other donors.” [GAO Report, page 17]

The full GAO report is available at: www.gao.gov/new.items/d04784.pdf

For more information, contact at the Institute for Public Accuracy:
Sam Husseini, (202) 347-0020; or David Zupan, (541) 484-9167

NANCY LESSIN
A founding member of Military Families Speak Out, Lessin organized a protest last night outside the Capitol as President Bush gave his State of the Union address. She said today: “Bush says ‘No one can now doubt the word of America.’ But from his distortions about Iraqi weapons of mass destruction, to his claiming to care about our soldiers in Iraq while not providing them with basic necessities in a war that they shouldn’t even be engaged in, he’s shown that his word cannot be trusted.”
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MIKE GRAVEL
While in the U.S. Senate, Gravel entered the Pentagon Papers into the Congressional Record. Last summer, he warned the nation of Bush’s “flimsy” evidence and urged Congress not to pass a Gulf of Tonkin type resolution. He said today: “Bush is triumphally applauded by a Congress he deceived. Congress impeached Clinton over his Lewinsky lies, but what is it going to do about Bush’s lies on Iraq? The state of the union is in trouble: its economy is being bankrupted by Bush and the Congress is whistling in the graveyard.” Gravel is currently chairman of the Democracy Foundation.
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REV. GRAYLAN HAGLER
Pastor at the Plymouth Congregational Church UCC in Washington, D.C., Hagler helped organize a theological response to the State of the Union address. Some 50 churches around the country followed suit. Hagler said today: “The common thread in Bush’s address was that this administration is for the wealthy and for corporations…. It was very good for people to be joined together at the church with a teach-in featuring information from policy people and various religious and spiritual responses.”

RAHUL MAHAJAN
Mahajan, author of the book Full Spectrum Dominance: U.S. Power in Iraq and Beyond, is just back from Iraq. He said today: “I saw no evidence of any reconstruction worthy of mention in all of Baghdad, a city of six million people. Not only has nothing been rebuilt, even the rubble from bombed-out buildings hasn’t been swept up. The new government of Iraq has been deliberately given no power and no authority; the talk of ‘transfer of sovereignty’ is nonsense. The claim that the United States does not seek to dominate or to be an empire is hardly compatible with long-term plans to leave over 100,000 American troops in Iraq. The claim that these new imperial policies have anything to do with fighting al-Qaeda is particularly hollow, and it’s no accident that there was no mention of Osama bin Laden in Bush’s speech. The proposal to double the budget of the National Endowment for Democracy poses a clear and present danger to democracy everywhere; in the past four years, the NED was involved in buying the 2000 Yugoslavia elections and plotting toward and funding the 2002 coup attempt in Venezuela….”
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STEPHEN ZUNES
Chair of the Peace and Justice Studies Program at the University of San Francisco, Zunes is Middle East editor for the Foreign Policy in Focus Project and author of the book Tinderbox: U.S. Middle East Policy and the Roots of Terrorism. He has written a critique of Bush’s address posted at the above web page.
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JIM JENNINGS
Jennings, director of Conscience International, recently returned from Iran where he met with the deputy foreign minister and with Shirin Ibadi, the recent Nobel Peace Prize winner. Jennings said today: “Bush claimed that America was made more secure by this administration. However, military officials have said repeatedly that there is no way to defend against suicide attacks, despite the trillions we have spent on the military. Increasing numbers of people throughout the world are increasingly angry with America precisely because of the activities of the Bush administration, so how can we say that America is more secure?…. Bush also said that ‘by our actions we have shown what kind of nation we are.’ I have just returned from a humanitarian mission in the earthquake region in Bam, Iran — the town looks like Hiroshima after the A-bomb. Unfortunately, violating the principle that humanitarian work should be done for its own sake and not for political purposes, the USAID field hospital was removed, after the medical team of 70 specialists had treated only 720 persons, following Tehran’s rebuff of the Elizabeth Dole mission. Is this the kind of nation we are?”
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GWENDOLYN MINK
Mink is the author of Welfare’s End and co-editor of Welfare: A Documentary History of U.S. Policy and Politics. She said today: “President Bush threatens to value marriage by amending the Constitution to prevent committed, stable, loving couples from marrying if they happen to be of the same sex. At the same time, he has proposed a $1.5 billion ‘marriage promotion’ policy to pressure poor single mothers to cure their poverty by finding a husband to support them. Taken as a whole, the Bush marriage initiative actually undermines marriage, transforming it from an intimate union between individuals to a governmental weapon to police and enforce heterosexual patriarchy. By turning marriage into a governmental institution, Bush aims to reverse 40 years of constitutional jurisprudence that makes intimate liberty a cornerstone of democratic equality. What’s more, linking governmental marriage policy to God, religion, and his faith-based initiative, as he did last night, Bush aims to undo more than 200 years of our national commitment to separate church and state.”
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STEFFIE WOOLHANDLER, DAVID HIMMELSTEIN
Associate professors of medicine at Harvard Medical School, Woolhandler and Himmelstein are co-authors of the study “Paying for National Health Insurance — And Not Getting It.” They said today: “The President has offered more of the same on health care — proposals that are sure to fail to control costs or expand coverage, but that will ship more federal dollars to the wealthy and to HMOs. His tax-free medical savings accounts would expand the massive tax subsidies for health care — at least $120 billion each year — that currently go mainly to the wealthy. At present, families making more than $100,000 annually receive federal tax subsidies for health insurance averaging $2,357 each year, while those making under $15,000 get only $71. The proposed tax credits for added coverage are far too skimpy to make adequate health insurance affordable for most of the uninsured.”
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JARED BERNSTEIN, [via Karen Conner]
Economic Policy Institute senior economist Bernstein said today: “President Bush failed to address the most important problem facing working families: the lack of job growth. Since the president took office in January of 2001, we’ve lost 2.3 million jobs…. He also said that jobs are on the rise. It’s true that job growth turned positive last August, but this was 21 months into the recovery that began in November of 2001, making this the most jobless recovery on record…. One of the President’s big applause lines last night was: ‘For the sake of job growth, the tax cuts you passed should be made permanent.’ In fact, the absence of job growth stands as a stark reminder of the limited impact of these huge, regressive expenditures…. The gap between the administration’s projected jobs impact of the tax cuts and actual job growth is over 1.6 million.”
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For more information, contact at the Institute for Public Accuracy:
Sam Husseini, (202) 347-0020; David Zupan, (541) 484-9167

Dr. APRIL HURLEY, MARTIN EDWARDS, Ret. U.S. Army Captain CHARLES LITEKY, KATHY KELLY, DANNY MULLER,
Hurley and Edwards (al-Dar Hotel), Liteky and Kelly (al-Fanar Hotel) are in Baghdad with 20 other members of the Iraq Peace Team. Phone lines are intermittent. Team members are assessing damage, visiting hospitals and placing articles and photos on the web. Several additional team members have recently crossed into Iraq from Jordan. Muller, in Chicago, is in regular touch with team members.

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JOY GORDON
Gordon, a Fairfield University professor, wrote “Cool War: Economic Sanctions as Weapons of Mass Destruction,” which appeared in Harper’s magazine (Nov. 2002). She said today: “The head of USAID, Andrew Natsios, claimed Tuesday that the Iraqi regime chose ‘not to repair the water system or replace old equipment with new equipment, so in many cases people are basically drinking untreated sewer water in their homes and have been for some years.’ But it has been the U.S. government that has prevented the procurement of the material needed to fix the water system. As a veto-bearing member of the Security Council’s 661 Committee, whose approval is required for infrastructure contracts for the oil-for-food program, the U.S. government unilaterally blocked billions of dollars of urgent humanitarian goods, including critical water and sanitation supplies. This, despite the frequent pleas from the Secretary General and continual requests from agencies such as UNICEF. While child mortality rates skyrocketed from water-borne diseases and other illnesses, the U.S. government unilaterally blocked or delayed urgently needed humanitarian contracts, including three sewage treatment plants, refrigerators for blood banks — even $210 million of child vaccines.”
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JAMES JENNINGS
President of Conscience International, a humanitarian relief organization, Jennings is currently in Amman, Jordan, working with the U.N. and other relief organizations. He said today: “The U.S. government has recently discovered the Geneva Conventions, along with Iraq’s desperate humanitarian need, after years of deliberate deafness to urgent pleas. Now, ironically, these two agendas have suddenly become a lately-invented casus belli for invasion. The international humanitarian aid community is firmly against the idea of armies posing as humanitarians, with bread in one hand and a gun in the other. This discredits genuine humanitarian assistance and puts the lives of aid workers in jeopardy.”
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SARAH ZAIDI
Zaidi is the research director of the Center for Economic and Social Rights and coauthor of the report, “The Human Costs of War in Iraq,” issued in February following a CESR research visit to Iraq. The report warned of a humanitarian catastrophe in the event of war and outlined likely failures of water and sewage systems, as is now occurring in Basra.
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For more information, contact at the Institute for Public Accuracy:
Sam Husseini, (202) 347-0020

The Associated Press reported yesterday that Afghan villagers in Bonavash are starving while attempting to survive by eating grass. The following statement, released today (Jan. 9) by the Institute for Public Accuracy, is from James Jennings, president of the humanitarian aid organization Conscience International. Jennings will return to Afghanistan on Jan. 16 for the group’s third mission since May, bringing assistance with food, blankets and health care. [See: www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A10129-2002Jan7.html,www.msnbc.com/news/682220.asp?0SB=I413 ]

Statement by JAMES JENNINGS [Contact: conscience@usa.com]:

It is too early to declare a humanitarian disaster averted in Afghanistan. Early in the Afghan campaign the U.S. recognized that it was necessary to win victories on both the military and humanitarian fronts. Yet while emphasizing that the war is not over, Washington has already hailed an early victory over a looming famine that threatened to kill millions.

World Food Program emergency deliveries, using local Afghan employees, have largely replaced the needed grain tonnage lost or delayed by the war. But merely restoring capacity destroyed by the war hardly constitutes a victory, because the time lost in fighting hunger and malnutrition cannot easily be made up.

The main concerns remain security and stability for the whole country — not just the capital; delivery of large-scale food assistance to remote or inaccessible regions; and the scant nutritional value of the food basket. Longer-term worries include the fact that people have eaten their seed grain, the irrigation system remains devastated, and farmers failed to plant winter wheat during October and November because of the war and bombing campaign.

I still expect preventable deaths to be very high, perhaps in the lower range predicted earlier, but a deadline of next spring is artificial. I don’t think the higher numbers will be reached this winter, but even the lowest previous estimate of up to 1 million deaths is bad enough. What we are likely to see over time is a continuum, a slow ticking of the clock extending far beyond May, with death for many of the most vulnerable, especially children, as a result. Severe malnutrition already exists among a significant percentage of the population.

The food budget for wheat purchases is adequate for the immediate emergency, but a bread-only diet is certainly inadequate for the neediest people. A complex emergency is just that: complex. People die because of malnutrition, disease, inability to reach medical care, enforced migration, exposure, and unhygienic conditions in the refugee camps. Probably triple the amount now being spent by USAID would come nearer to solving the problem. I would spend more on transportation-related items, to make sure food aid reached the people in the mountains, and reached them in time to survive the winter. Then I would double the caloric value of the food basket by diversification, primarily with more legumes and ghee.

While USAID has done a fine job so far, last week USAID administrator Andrew Natsios did some fancy footwork with the numbers. They appear to be impressive, and indeed the December total tonnage is impressive. But in my calculation, it merely makes up for the amounts not delivered during the war. Still, it came a bit late. Put the lack of seed grain together with the inability to plant in October during the heaviest bombing, and the snows on mountain roads and trails, and you can see that, to reach their targets, WFP is delivering grain mostly to four cities: Mazar, Kabul, Jalalabad (which has road access to food supplies anyway and hasn’t suffered so much in the drought) and Herat. Secretary Rumsfeld may think things are infinitely better in Afghanistan than before the war, but I doubt if most of the burka-clad beggars I regularly see there would agree.

For more information, contact at the Institute for Public Accuracy:
Sam Husseini, (202) 347-0020; Norman Solomon, (415) 552-5378